The governor's office says no additional money was ever promised, and the General Assembly in its November veto session did not allocate any more funds.

"We were very clear from the beginning that this money for fiscal year `05 was all the money we had," said Becky Carroll, spokeswoman for the governor's office of management and budget. CeaseFire, the city's largest anti-violence initiative, more than doubled in size earlier this year, and police and other officials credit the program with contributing to a sharp drop in homicides.

The program's funding trouble comes on the heels of a loss of government funding for another key crime-fighting initiative, Project Safe Neighborhoods. Late last month, Congress dropped all funding for state and local grants for the Justice Department's program to curb illegal gun use. The Bush administration had asked for more than $45 million for grants to underwrite everything from vocational training and counseling for parolees to police units dedicated to seizing guns. Project Safe Neighborhoods' current funding in Chicago--about $1.3 million--is in place through part of 2006, but there is no guarantee of new money for the programs.

For CeaseFire to work, Slutkin said, it has to maintain a strong presence on city streets. He's confident additional funding will be found.

The bulk of CeaseFire's funding comes from the state--about $5.1 million of the program's $6.8 million budget this calendar year, according to Slutkin. The rest of the money comes from foundations, private contributions and federal grants.

Slutkin said he expects nearly a million dollars in federal money to come through in the spring. In the meantime, CeaseFire officials are scrambling to piece together whatever additional money they can find.

But for the moment, CeaseFire has to prepare to reduce its ranks.

The program employs mainly reformed gang members to work with people in violent neighborhoods, steering them away from a criminal life and toward jobs and educational opportunities. "We're carrying just under a thousand clients," Slutkin said. "Between two-thirds and three-fourths of them are ex-offenders, and we're fairly successfully helping them make the transition. If we cut our staff, that relationship between outreach support and [these ex-offenders] would essentially fall apart."

Autry Phillips, public safety supervisor for the Target Area Development Corp.'s CeaseFire operation in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, said he and his 12 outreach workers could be out of a job as early as Dec.15.

He said the layoffs would have an immediate impact on CeaseFire's 159 clients in Auburn-Gresham, 75 percent of whom he described as "high-risk and hardcore."

"If funding ends on the 15th, we're going to feel the effect on the 16th," Phillips said.

Sarah Jane Knoy, executive director of the Uptown-based Organization of the NorthEast, said that she and other groups that work with Ceasefire would speak to city aldermen Wednesday morning in hopes of finding new funding sources.

At a Maywood Village Board meeting Monday night, CeaseFire community coordinator Tio Hardiman asked the village for funding to keep the program going. CeaseFire launched in Maywood earlier this year, and homicides there have dropped from 20 last year to 10 so far this year.

Mayor Ralph Conner said the village might be able to find $25,000 for the program.

"This is a very good program," said Carroll, of the governor's budget office. "We've tried to step up as much as possible to give them the assistance they need. Hopefully they'll be able to identify additional sources of funding to help them through."